Ep. 38 - How Did Purity Culture Impact Christian Millennials?

What if the values you were taught as a teenager about sex and relationships actually sowed seeds of shame and confusion? On this episode of the Psych and Theo podcast, we uncover the tangled web of purity culture, a movement rooted in the 1990s, aimed at ensuring Christian millennials saved sex for marriage. Yet, reality paints a different picture, with most folks experiencing their first sexual encounters long before tying the knot. This gap between ideology and real life has left many grappling with mixed messages about their bodies and desires.

Join us as we discuss the deeper psychological and theological layers of sexual morality and purity culture. Through the lens of 1 Corinthians, we delve into the profound nature of sexual relationships, exploring the consequences of sexual sins and the enduring memories they create. But it's not all about the weight of past actions; we also highlight the importance of redemption and the possibility of fresh starts, regardless of one's sexual history. We ponder the complex chemical bonds that form through these intimate acts and offer a path forward that includes grace and understanding.

In a world still feeling the ripples of purity culture, we turn to the themes of shame and redemption within Christianity. We acknowledge the struggles many face, yearning for healing from the scars of rigid teachings and unrealistic expectations. Our conversation emphasizes the power of community, mentorship, and grace in overcoming the shadows of the past. Finally, we tease an upcoming exploration into how purity culture has evolved and transformed into today's modesty culture, a topic ripe for continued conversation and reflection.

Chapters

• 0:02 Impact of Purity Culture on Millennials
• 11:20 Sexual Morality and Purity Culture
• 14:39 Sexual Shame and Redemption in Christianity
• 24:15 Navigating Grace After Purity Culture

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hi everyone, welcome back to the Psych and Theo podcast. Sam and Tim here talking about an important topic that has actually come up in a lot of conversations that I've had with some friends and co-workers about the impact of purity culture on Christian millennials. This has been a topic that people have been discussing, because I think I have I don't know if it's that I have a different perspective, but I haven't felt the same amount of impact that a lot of people that I've talked to have had. It's been very interesting because they see it with a lot of bitterness and some anger even, and a lot of shame, which I do understand that piece as well as well. But it'll be interesting as we go through our topic today, through our discussion of the different views of purity culture and just how it's impacted men and women, because there seems to be a clear distinction in how it impacts each of us and also on what the effects are from a psychological perspective and how it's damaged even a couple of relationships.

Speaker 1: 1:02

So if you've been tuning in, thank you for doing so, Remember to subscribe to the podcast and share with your friends. Leave us a rating and we greatly appreciate that. All right, so let's talk about purity culture and the impact that it's had on Christian millennials. As we jump into this topic, everyone's going to have a perspective on this, so I'll share mine at the end. But I want to share with you guys, I guess, a couple of things. One is just what the numbers are on how it's affected people or what the kind of common theme is around this.

Speaker 2: 1:35

Well, first, what is purity culture? Explain that for the audience.

Speaker 1: 1:39

So purity culture. So if you're just tuning in, if you're a Christian and maybe weren't exposed to this, maybe you were this is something that maybe was like a 90s. It was a strong push in the 90s to seek out purity before marriage, which essentially meant to not have sex until marriage. So the movement itself kind of wanted to emphasize sexual purity and they took some extreme measures in order to get that done. A lot of messaging, negative messaging, that impacted the way that people viewed themselves and the way that they viewed sex within marriage and even outside of marriage. So essentially, the purity culture was that just the push for sexual abstinence until you get married.

Speaker 2: 2:22

And then it morphed into what you said, a lot of extra things, so we could agree that sex before marriage the scriptures say don't do it. Yeah, like, yeah, the marriage bed is holy and sex is confined to that union. Yeah, but purity culture took this as we talked about in the legalism episode. Legalism starts out with this good intention of not sinning, but what ends up happening is it creates all kinds of rules and principles for people to follow so that they don't sin, but if you violate the rules and principles, then you automatically are sinning. Yeah, that's what legalism is. Yeah, and purity culture is one of these things that cropped up on this issue.

Speaker 1: 3:07

Yeah, no, I think just in my head I just started thinking about, as you were sharing, that I mean, it was so bad, it was almost cringy right the things, the messages that they had for the youth at the time, for the church in general, and I was just picturing in my head. I remember seeing this youth pastor and he was talking about he was doing like some sort of rap song with these kids. I don't know if you've seen it, but they're standing on the stage and they're teaching the teenagers and the song was virginity is cool, virginity is cool, come on, come on. Virginity is cool. What up? Virginity is cool, he's got it, he's got it. So they're chanting this all out. Not that that itself is bad again, but you just realize this was happening during that time and the emphasis again behind it was hey, save sex for marriage. So the message virginity is cool is not that it's bad, it's that the effort to communicate a message hey, sex is good in marriage, save it for that time. But what's happening before then? Right, what kind of life are you living before then? That's going to create all this shame and doubt and have you question your identity and so on. So just to kind of share a little bit about where this kind of ended up regarding how people viewed sex, because it didn't help.

Speaker 1: 4:28

This push for sexual purity or sexual abstinence actually didn't help the numbers go down. In fact, it made it made an increase, even a little bit. This is from Santelli et al 2017. The average age of American women and men's first sexual encounters are between 17 and 18 years old. So right, when they're hitting that, you know adult age of 18.

Speaker 1: 4:58

But the average age of marriage is between 27 for women and 30 for men. So you can imagine when you're most sexually aroused, which is your teenage years, you're receiving these messages of how you need to save sex for marriage. And then you look at the cultural trend of people getting married at 27, 30 years old. Like that's a long time for being in that sexual space. How do you maintain that all the way until you're 27, 30 years old and you know what's going on there. So what's happened was that, as you're getting all these messages, no one was actually talking about having those feelings come up as normal, like even having the feeling of sexual urges or sexual desire. That was seen as bad, and no one was talking to these adolescents or teenagers about that.

Speaker 2: 5:47

So, if you become aroused, you are therefore sending.

Speaker 1: 5:50

The arousal itself caused a lot of shame for people because they're thinking to themselves, especially for the guys. They're thinking why am I having this sexual arousal when I'm not even thinking of this? This is happening and I don't know how to make sense of this. Even thinking of this, this is happening and I don't know how to make sense of this. So you're having these physical experiences and then you're being taught that having any type of sexual desire is wrong or that you need to save that for marriage. That's confusing for teenagers and I do understand for parents who grew up during the 60s and 70s right, the whole sexual revolution. It makes sense why they would want to push back against that. Right, they know what it looked like, they know how they were, they know what the culture was like. So you know what. I don't want to see my kids go through that. So I'm going to heavily emphasize hey, save yourself for marriage, make sure you do things right, keep your boundaries and so on. But they didn't talk about what those other elements are that come naturally for boys and for girls. Right, the research and a lot of things for girls really talked about how they viewed their bodies and how they were the ones that were responsible for maintaining that purity, that that was all their work, that if they lost that, then basically they were worthless. And that is a common theme and message they have heard from many women where they felt like their value was attached to that single thing and not all these other things, other virtues that you could have developed throughout that time. So we can understand how purity culture has impacted both young boys and young women during that time. So that was really really interesting. The expectation there was an expectation that all women will marry men and the objectification that their sexuality and bodies will then belong to their husbands. There is an expectation that comes the night of a woman's wedding, she will be competent enough to satisfy her husband sexually despite a lifetime of sexual oppression, guilt and shame. So it's all this pressure mounted up to this moment of the honeymoon or the wedding night and so on. And for those who grew up with, did save themselves for that time, now your body's just responding completely different now, because how are you supposed to even have this experience when all the messaging that you've heard around that has been bad or negative? You can see a lot of that in these marriages or these people who have who saved themselves for marriage.

Speaker 1: 8:08

Another common thing that came up as I was reading through this research was the idea that if you do save yourself, you won't experience shame after marriage. And maybe I shared this with you before, tim, but there was there's a Christian sex therapist that we have in town and one of the things that he and he's worked, obviously, with a lot of couples and one of the things that he said he saw the impact of purity culture on marriages who, either the man or the woman typically it was a woman had experienced some sort of sexual trauma or some sort of trauma in her past, and when she came to the wedding night, she associated any type of physical touch to that prior abuse. So even though she saved herself, she never talked about any prior abuse that she had experienced before. And now comes the wedding night. Now her husband is pretty much the bad guy because of that experience from her past.

Speaker 1: 9:00

So the belief that if you save yourself for marriage it's always going to be good, that was a lie for a lot of people because they still experienced shame. They weren't on the same page whenever they did want to become intimate. They struggled with communicating about what's good and what's not, so all of these things that still come with the reality of marriage they still encountered, but they weren't taught how to manage those things. They still encountered, but they weren't taught how to manage those things. So what we're seeing is basically through purity cultures. There was a lot of messaging that was well-intended, or maybe a little bit was well-intended, but had a lot of different negative consequences that were maybe unexpected. The expectation was, if I save myself for marriage, my sex life is going to be great or it's going to be blessed by God. But the reality is that we're still human and you still encounter all these different facets of life, especially previous traumas for many people.

Speaker 2: 9:51

So there was, if you kind of put this in buckets before marriage. There's a false confidence that everything's going to be great. Once I'm married, all these urges will have a place and I won't have any problems, and a false confidence in that, as long as I'm not having sex, everything's okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, as long as I don't do that thing, I'll mess up in a lot of other ways as long as I don't do that. And then after marriage, feelings of guilt, shame associated with sexual experience, maybe based on trauma from the past or just based on shame culture, yeah, around sex from from their past.

Speaker 1: 10:35

There was a third one I just blanked on, but even even even sexual experiences prior to marriage mean that, let's say, the person was committed to wanting remain absent until marriage. But they get in a relationship, they've been dating for a while and you know, they had one night where they messed up. Even even if it was that one time, maybe twice where they messed up and they still go into marriage, they still carry the shame and guilt from that experience into the marriage because it was so heavily emphasized that that's all they think about, like, oh, I messed up, it would have been so different had I not messed up prior to that right. So again, that false belief is still there in that they get married. They had these previous sexual experiences and they think to themselves, oh, I wonder how much different it would have been had I not given myself before marriage.

Speaker 2: 11:20

There's some legitimacy to that. Yeah, in the sense that, you know, paul says in 1 Corinthians all sins that we commit outside the body are outside the body. But the one who sins sexually sins against his or her own body, and he talks about how, if a man is joined to a prostitute, they become one flesh. There's a spiritual union there, and so there is a gravity to sexual experience with another person. There's a gravity to it and a seriousness to it that shouldn't be overlooked and downplayed. So in one sense, yeah, what young people need to hear is that, yeah, sex is serious, all sin is sin. But if I'm five years old and I steal a candy bar from the store, that's wrong and I'm going to learn from that. But that's very different than being sexualized as a five-year-old.

Speaker 2: 12:11

You know what I'm saying you know, and so man this, these episodes are going to get throttled.

Speaker 2: 12:17

We're talking about some heavy topics, but hey, this is psychology and theology together. So so young people need to hear that sex is an important thing. There is a gravity to it, there's a seriousness to it, but I think what happened in purity culture is that if you fall, that's it. You've ruined something completely. Rather than understanding. Okay, that's a sin and it does have consequences that ripple out into the future.

Speaker 2: 12:46

Yeah, you're going to have memories when you're married. You're still going to remember those things from the past. I mean, every guy who's ever looked at pornography knows what I'm talking about. Those images stay with you and you can either choose to block them out or forget them and work through that and get past it, but those things stay with you because sex is just a powerful thing. It is. So, yeah, my concern is that some people would look, listen to our conversation and say, oh well, see, there's not somebody. Some people in the past made a big deal about sex and so I should not make that big of it. It's just sex. You know it's like whoa, it's not quote unquote just sex.

Speaker 1: 13:22

You know it's a serious thing yeah, and you know, you touched on it just now too, tim is that the sexual act itself it's a bonding experience and it's that experience that God intended it to be, which is why he says to save that for your spouse. And obviously, just talking about the chemical bonds or the attachments that you make when you have sex with someone, the reason why people sometimes can't let go of a relationship is because they have had sex and they stay within that relationship because they're bonded chemically, because they had that experience. Maybe it was their first love, second love, whatever the case is. So those things I mean that's how God intended for that to happen, when it's done within its proper context. So, to kind of repeat what Tim said, we're not saying that because this was emphasized so much in purity culture that it's not that important anymore. We do still need to pay attention to the fact that you want to be pure until marriage, but let's say you're not there right now, cause there's going to be a lot of people who are listening who maybe, maybe you haven't saved yourself from marriage, right? So you're looking at it here in this conversation. I think to yourself well, what does that mean for me? I do want to be pure until marriage, and I have been since that last time. Order the case is so. I think that's what we're going to continue to talk about is okay. What does this mean for us?

Speaker 1: 14:39

And the group that seems to have been affected most is kind of the Christian millennials, maybe a little bit of the Gen Zers afterwards, but Christian millennials those are the population that have been hearing more about this, which makes sense, being in the 90s. But yeah, so these led to these extreme psychological effects of purity culture, led to extreme feelings of shame, guilt and anxiety around sexuality. Now, again, you may still have experienced that had you not been taught or had you not grown up in purity culture. Right, because again, the act itself or the being in a relationship itself, those things bring on anxiety anyways. So what we're seeing from purity culture is that it created anxiety, but in a different space, in something that was meant to be good. There's all this anxiety about it to perform well or that it's supposed to be good, and it may not have been like that.

Speaker 1: 15:33

So many millennials internalize messages of shame and guilt about their natural sexual desires, which led to heightened anxiety around intimacy and relationships, and again, this goes back to the point I was making earlier about if the emphasis of be pure until marriage was still there, but also conversations about the reality that, hey, just because you are saving yourself for marriage, you still have to talk through a lot of things as well. Right, you're still going to have to talk about the different layers or stages in life where there are different stressors and there's different life experiences that you're having that may impact that sexual part of your marriage. So some people just they think that because they save themselves for marriage, that everything is going to be good, similar to like living a Christian life where, okay, if you follow all these principles that God has seen in scripture, your life is going to go better. Right, so they assume that everything in their life is going to go better without any struggles or tribulations. But you know that's not the reality.

Speaker 2: 16:38

Let's hone back in on the people who maybe have regrets. Yeah, because I think we might have left them hanging a little bit. My message to them would be that the cross can cover sins, all sins, just because you might have messed up before marriage and you're a Christian and maybe you weren't a Christian then, or maybe you were a Christian and you still messed up and you're going into marriage and you're like well, crap, I've just kind of screwed things up. Well, there's redemption. The Lord can redeem things. You're still going to feel the effects of sin.

Speaker 2: 17:11

Like I said, there's ripple effects throughout life for all the decisions that we make. But the Lord can redeem you and he's already. If you're a Christian, he's already forgiven you. So I think at that point, if you are repentant of those sins, then work on receiving the Lord's forgiveness and I guess forgiving yourself, allowing yourself to move on. You know from that, because the Lord doesn't want you to stay bound to the guilt of previous sins, that he's already forgiven you. That would. That will just hamstring your life. It will hamstring your walk with the Lord and what he could do with you.

Speaker 1: 17:50

Yeah, you have to be able to move on from that? Absolutely no, and thank you for sharing that, tim. I think that is something that listeners need to hear. Is that there's so much weight given to this one aspect of our lives? And it does carry. You know, we talked in one episode about just different sins carry different consequences, and this is one of those because it affects family life, it affects everything.

Speaker 1: 18:11

But, that being said to your point, there's still redemption after that, and you know, we come back to this aspect of okay, what does life look like after I fail in this area? And there's this aspect of repentance, and repentance is correct me if I'm wrong the idea of confessing your sin and then turning away from it. Right, but sometimes people get stuck in that loop of once they have crossed that line, it makes it easier to cross the next time, and I think that's maybe where some of our listeners may fall into as well is that they may feel like I'm still stuck in this, like I'm still attached to this, like I'm still attached to this person that I had sex with whatever number of years ago, or I'm still struggling with this. What does that mean for me? And I wonder, from a biblical perspective? Still, the cross can cover that. But practically what does that look like?

Speaker 1: 19:07

And we look at a couple of attachments and those who do commit to sin. They create either an anxious thought where they want to go into a relationship, make sure they do everything right, and if they don't do something right then they're going to be let go of. So there's that constant fear of I'm not going to be good enough, so I'm going to be let go and I'm not going to have a great relationship. Then there's the avoidant that's not going to go into it at all because they feel I messed up, I don't want to get into another relationship, so I'm just going to completely avoid any type of relationship so I don't mess up and feel the Lord again.

Speaker 1: 19:39

So you have all this going on at once and I guess the message for that is that the healing can only come in the context of relationships. So for men, I encourage being around mentors, other friends who are in the same stage that you're in, who can encourage you and continue to provide some sense of comfort and community for you as you move through that stage, and also for the women. You know it's interesting because they tend to go a little bit deeper when they're talking about these issues is that they'll talk heavily about the shame and there's a lot of healing for them and being able to share that with each other. And I don't know if it's the same for men. I don't know if you I mean working with guys. I don't know if you've seen that where them sharing actually makes them feel more shame, you know, because they feel that if other men are not struggling with that, that there's something wrong with them.

Speaker 2: 20:36

I think well, guys can get isolated quickly and think well, I'm the only one struggling with this thing, and so they won't talk to anyone else about it.

Speaker 1: 20:45

Yeah, there was some research done by. Basically, she found that focusing on absence and virginity can lead to anxiety, guilt and sexual problems. The pressure to meet these ideals causes stress and confusion about identity and desires, and again that goes back to again. You're more than just your past sexual experiences, right, there's so much more that the Lord is redeeming, but it is an important part of your story to understand, to know how to operate in future relationships.

Speaker 1: 21:18

One research study looked at married Christian women's experiences with premarital and marital sex. They found that women often felt guilty during their first sexual experiences, whether before or after marriage. This is for those who grew up in purity culture. This suggests that sexual shame can stay with people, no matter their marital status. And we did an episode on shame and we talked about shame in the context of identity and in this case it's sexual shame which is directly related just to the experience of sexual behaviors. So for women in this case parents have a lot of sexual shame from those first experiences, because there are things that you remember, right, first boyfriend or first time, whatever the case is, they seem to have a stronger attachment to that.

Speaker 1: 22:03

They kind of concluded again, it was a paper, it wasn't done by any Christian, but they kind of concluded that it enforces gender roles and restrict how men and women express their sexual desires and experience sexual pleasure. So I don't know what it was like for you growing up, but for me it was emphasized on both sides. Like guys, you need to restrain yourself, control yourself, you know, keep your eyes pure. That was emphasized heavily. But it seems what this article seemed to suggest was that for some men or for some Christian circles, is that well, it was justified because they're men and they're going to have these natural inclinations to seek out sex, so it's not going to have the same impact on them. I didn't experience that growing up. Like it was heavily emphasized on both sides. What was that like it?

Speaker 2: 22:46

was the same. Oh yeah, yeah, heavily influenced on both sides. I remember a play I saw as a little I was young, maybe like 11, 12 or something. We went to this church and it was a play. Like 11, 12 or something. We went to this church and it was a play, and I mean the opening scene of the play was hell, okay, and it was terrifying as a 12 year old.

Speaker 2: 23:06

They were depicting hell and the teenage boy gets pulled out of hell by an angel or maybe it was Jesus, I don't remember and they start talking about his life and then he recalls what happens in his life, life and he and this girl they meet, they start dating and then they mess up and they have sex. That's like sets. The whole drama of the show is like they had sex, you know, and then I think she, I think she got pregnant from that and they were worried like what are we gonna do? What are we gonna do? And the thing whole plays spirals downward where the girl ends up shooting him and then killing herself. That was a play, that was the play, you know. And so and uh, when they, when they are before the lord, the boy he had, he had accepted christ. He was a christian already, so he, he goes to heaven. But the girl wasn't a christian, so she gets dragged to hell. Yeah, I don't know what happened to the baby. I don't know what happened to the baby, yeah oh man, yeah, it was a play.

Speaker 2: 24:05

That was a. That was a play when a christian christian church when I was growing up. Yeah, yeah, so that's purity culture baby right and again.

Speaker 1: 24:15

I just kind of reminded of how much it was. I mean, you saw it everywhere Plays churches.

Speaker 2: 24:22

And again there was the analogy of the rose. So if you know that one where, like a youth pastor, you go to a youth rally I saw this a couple of times A speaker he would take a rose and he would have people go pass it around and they got to play with the pedals and stuff and it just got passed around the room the whole time and by the time it got back to him the rose was completely wilted and like destroyed. And he's like that's what it's like when you let people have sex with you before marriage. You you end up like this yeah, like who would want this rose, you know?

Speaker 1: 24:50

Yeah, oh man. All of that right, all of that messaging, and yet still no healthy conversation on what that would actually look like.

Speaker 2: 25:02

And again, there's always this element of truth in things You're like. There's an element of truth in the fact that, yeah, if you sleep around with a bunch of people, that's going to affect your future relationships. So there's an element of truth in that, you know. But the lack of redemption, the lack of grace in that kind of messaging was what was so incredibly harmful about it.

Speaker 1: 25:28

Yeah, I agree, and you know, kind of closing out here in this last piece of, as we talked about purity culture and the different effects that it has on people, one of the things that you've mentioned that is an emphasis that I wanted to add to was that aspect of grace is that if you grew up in a culture that emphasized purity culture or that's very shaming you really need to study heavily more on the grace part to find a balance there, because it's likely that you're probably still looking back at those past mistakes and stuck there. Basically, looking back at those past mistakes and stuck there. Basically, right, a person who experiences heavy shame thinks that if they do enough work, that that shame will eventually be removed from their identity. If you become a good enough Christian, at some point down the road, that piece of you is going to disappear, and that's not how it works. The way that shame works when you've experienced so much of it is that you learn how to identify and you learn how to manage it better, which means that you can look at that younger version of yourself. We can say, and you can say okay, at that stage, here's what I was working with or here's what I was taught, and that was the decision that I made at that time.

Speaker 1: 26:35

What would present day self say to a younger version? To provide maybe a different, a balanced view of where they are at that moment? Like you know, I have three boys. My oldest is eight. Once he starts getting to a stage, if he hears from me that I don't want you to be my son, or it communicates him in some way, shape or form that he has done the worst possible thing, that I don't even want him to be my son. I communicated something wrong to him. So I have to look at him and say, okay, how does God approach me whenever I'm in sin or whenever I've messed up before? What has he done for me? And a big part of that has been acknowledging that he gives me grace and not that he's going to hammer me again for sinning right. So there's a balance, right. There's the acknowledgement I've sinned, lord, I sinned against you. Help me to clean this from my life and there's the aspect of grace. I don't deserve your mercy, but yet you're giving it to me, right.

Speaker 1: 27:33

And I think that's kind of the approach that you want to take. Is that if you grew up in a heavily shaming, dirty culture type of environment growing up, then you you want to take is that if you grew up in a heavily shaming purity culture type of environment growing up, then you really want to place some focus on the grace so you can understand how God operates when we do sin. Because if you're only experiencing shame again, not all shame is bad. Some shame is good and it brings you back to the Lord. But if you're only experiencing shame and not God's grace, then I would encourage just kind of focusing on that. It's a good place to wrap it up yeah, so yeah, do that.

Speaker 1: 28:06

Surround yourselves with other believers who also have that perspective, because I think that's where I experienced it the most. Is that what I was most shamed about and I shared it to some brothers. They were able to kind of look at it and say, hey, man, we're here for you, here's what the Bible teaches. Let's walk through this together. And they joined me in that journey and it was helpful. That's how I acknowledged and saw God's grace.

Speaker 2: 28:25

Yeah, I'd say we probably should do a part two sometime on this, explaining where the legalistic elements of this cropped up and what that looked like and how it still plays out today. Yeah, so it went from purity culture to modesty culture.

Speaker 1: 28:38

Yeah, that's right, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 28:40

So that'll be part two sometime down the road All right, All right guys.

Speaker 1: 28:45

Well, thank you for tuning in. We will talk to you next time.